tobermory's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Boo. My co-worker/fellow cubicle dweller has spent a goodly amount of time today on the phone trying to get one of her friends and/or her husband to go to a haunted house with her. She�s not originally from this country and I think that she believes an expensive visit to one of these fake blood baths will help to complete her American experience. She couldn�t really come up with a good reason to go � it was mostly hemming and hawing about how she thinks it�s something she should try. I chose not to speak up because who am I to stomp on the completion of someone�s perceived Americanization? But personally? I�ll take a pass. You see, I am a giant pussy when it comes to such things. The last Haunted House I went to was back around 1978 when I was maybe 9 years old. The local Community House * was sponsoring a Halloween party � probably some sort of do-good effort to keep us kids off the streets and away from apples with razor blades in them. They had some games in the gym, costume contests and a haunted house in the basement. I went with a bunch of neighborhood kids and after exhausting the fun in the gym we decided to brave the promised horrors. There was a darkened maze that took you past a bunch of tableaux � the kind with the crazy surgeon chopping up his patient, the tenuously chained up madman, the creepy cemetary � you know the drill. I�m pretty sure this was a low-budget affair and I don�t remember the fakey tableaux freaking me out too much, but there were parts of the maze where it got really, really dark and we had to walk over squishy things and then suddenly some sort of Frankenstein-esque monster was near me � IN THE WALKING PART OF THE MAZE � you know, THE PART THAT I WAS WALKING IN. I basically lost my shit. I shrieked the shriek that only little girls can shriek (probably deafening the Franken-thing in the process) and then my skinny little legs took off as fast as I could and I tell you, in that instant, I could have outrun Carl Lewis. I made it to the end of the maze in about a nanosecond � possibly passing more staggering monsters - and then I think I may have burst into tears. And that was it for haunted houses and me because childhood has enough scary things going on without purposefully adding more. That was until this year when I started to feel that maybe, just maybe, I should try to overcome this fear. So I read a Chicago Tribune article wherein they had visited a number of popular local haunted houses and gave them ratings and described the scariest part of the experience � I figured I could choose one that sounded �fun�. Actually, I didn�t even make it all the way through the article because when they described how in part of one haunted house you would be in a creepy old cargo elevator and out of the dark corner would emerge some horrific demon and IT WOULD BE IN THE ELEVATOR WITH YOU FOR THE DURATION OF THE RIDE. Now, I know they can�t touch you, but that doesn�t prevent them from getting thisfuckingclose and acting like menacing loonies. Since just reading about this made me want to sit in a corner and cry, I decided that maybe I�ll try to face this fear next year. * As an aside, when I was a kid the �Cootie House�, as we called it, was not nearly so grand as it apparently is now, judging from their uber-ritzy website. Sure the building was big and nice looking, but inside it was a little worn about the edges, they showed third-run movies for a buck in the theater with wooden, butt-busting seats, there was a grungy bowling alley where the fitness center is now, and the most high-class activities were the children�s ballet school (yes, I did attend � for about five years - and I�m still a klutz and my posture is crappy, so you can see how awesome it was), and, I think, adult education French classes. I don�t think anyone would have ever considered hosting their wedding reception there � something that�s apparently common now. Oh, and for a long time they held The World�s Largest Rummage Sale (yes, it really was � the Guinness people said so) which now has been supplanted by an antique show featuring overpriced Modernist furniture and accessories to which I am going next weekend. Shut-up � I can too complain about how snobby something is and then go to it anyway. Oh hey � Jane? � if you�ve been looking over your stats the past few days and wondering who the nutbag is who has been obsessively working their way back through your archives � um, that would be me. Remember me from Green bay/Rehab? If I knew you liked e-mail so much I�d certainly have sent you some (I usually assume I�m bothering people), and I hope you�ll be coming up for the thingy in January in Green Bay � it�s fun and you aren�t expected to tart yourself up in some specific way � it�s more of a general tartiness. So anyway, I hope you�ll think about coming up because I enjoyed sitting next to you at the fancy-schmancy dinner and finding out that we have lived eerily parallel lives. Also, I�m sorry to hear about LB � it made me sad. Yesterday: 4:11 p.m. - 2007-10-26 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||
|
||||||